Mobile phones are becoming increasingly popular, and people generally carry their phones with them at all times. As such, it is of advantage to reduce the sizes and weights of phones, in order to make them more convenient to carry.
One of the main limiting factors of miniaturization of phones is keypad size. Conventional keypads include twelve keys, and have already been reduced in size to the threshold where it is difficult for a person to dial phone numbers quickly and accurately.
Ideally, by reducing the number of keys in a phone's keypad, the size of the phone may be reduced. However, with fewer than twelve keys there are not enough keys to support the ten symbols 0-9, and the two symbols * and #, which are required for dialing.
Today, miniature phones have been integrated within watches. Cell phone watches, such as the M500 Cellwatch™ manufactured and distributed by My Mobile Watch of Shenzhen City, China, and the W-100 Watch manufactured by Hyundai Corporation of Seoul, Korea, use touch screens for dialing. Other cell phone watches use scrolling between digits to select them one at a time for dialing.
These and other miniature phones use entry mechanisms that are cumbersome, or use pre-defined phone numbers for short code dialing. It would thus be of advantage to provide a miniature phone keypad with a simple intuitive mechanism for entering phone numbers.